Who made it: Directed by David Miller. With Kirk Douglas, Walter Matthau, Gena Rowlands.

Audience appeal: 12 and up.

Once upon a time: In a tiny New Mexican town, rough-and-ready cowboy Jack Burns picks a fight with the cops — simply so they'll put him in jail, where he can help a friend break out. But the friend won't run, so Jack does — with only his horse, his bedroll and his rifle, as squad cars, sharpshooters and even a helicopter pilot mobilize to bring him back in.

Inappropriate material: There's some hard drinking, and fistfights, and Jack definitely has a problem with authority.

Why kids will like it: The adolescent appeal of the rebel is always strong, and Jack Burns is a great one — strong, independent, and able to beat anybody and anything except the slow dull march of progress. He's no role model (maybe), but he's a real fighter, and the film has several great action sequences, including his fight with a wily one-armed man and his final meet-up with a brutal George Kennedy.

Why adults will like it: Douglas' favorite film, and it's easy to see why; the iconoclastic, independent Burns is an idealized version of the star himself, a cocky man's man who goes his own way as stubbornly as he rides his horse up that mountain. Gena Rowlands is lovely, too, as an old flame (and his friend's wife) and while Walter Matthau doesn't quite convince as a small-town sheriff, the crisp, clear, on-location photography puts us right in the middle of a West that, as Burns feared, was already being fenced in or paved over.

Fast forward/freeze frame: It's all pretty straightforward, except for why the film keeps cutting back to Carroll O'Connor on the highway, driving a truckload full of toilets. Don't worry. It'll eventually become horrifyingly clear.

Fun trivia: That one-armed man who takes on Douglas in the bar fight? Bill Raisch from North Bergen, the same actor David Janssen was always searching for on "The Fugitive." (Raisch lost his arm in the Navy, in World War II.)

Teachable moments: The studio sold this as just another Western. It flopped. Imagine if they'd advertised it for what it really is — a meditation on red-white-and-blue radicalism, based on a novel by the anarchist Edward Abbey, adapted into a script by blacklisted lefty Dalton Trumbo, and starring Douglas as an anti-authoritarian hero who refuses to carry I.D. just on general principle. For a simple story once called "The Brave Cowboy," it's got a lot of ideas in it, and a lot worth talking about.

Double features: With its strong language and flashes of nudity, it's definitely for older teens, but "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is another great film about iconoclastic rebellion — and, not coincidentally, a movie Kirk Douglas tried to make for over a decade until he got too old for the part, and gave it to his son Michael to produce. Someone named Jack Nicholson ended up being pretty good in it, though.